A few years back, I found myself amazed and appalled by feminist lawprof Ann Bartow’s ability to find a spin that turned almost anything into a sexist icon, whether for good or evil. I imagined she spent her days looking under rocks to find things to be outraged about, and wondered what she would do if the day ever came when she couldn’t come up with an outrage that passed the laugh test.

At Huff Post, such a post surfaced.

“Black Twitter” said it once, but let’s say it again: It is not cool for white women to wear black hairstyles. It is not cute. It is not flattering.

When white women wear black hairstyles, it’s a slap in the face to black women.

Black men are being gunned down in the street by police at shocking rates. Sandra Bland ended up dead in a jail cell. And the pressing question is “she stole my hairstyle”? Continue reading →

The issue arising in the petition for cert on behalf of George Georgiou is whether the government’s Brady obligation stands alone, or whether it is contingent on the defense lawyer’s due diligence.  The issue arose from a witness against Georgiou who had some psychological issues:

The main witness against Mr. Georgiou was Kevin Waltzer, the former business partner, and Mr. Georgiou’s lawyers had asked the prosecutors for all sorts of information about Mr. Waltzer, including whether he had suffered from mental disabilities, emotional disturbances and the like.

But the prosecutors failed to provide a transcript and a report that would have disclosed that Mr. Waltzer had been diagnosed with anxiety and depression and had taken drugs to control those conditions. That information would have been useful during Mr. Waltzer’s cross-examination. It might also have led the defense to discover that Mr. Waltzer had received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder.

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At the New York Times’ Room for Debate, the question posed was whether Jon Stewart had a serious lesson for journalists.  Hey, it could have been about Cecil the lion, so wipe that smirk off your face.

As Jon Stewart steps down as host of “The Daily Show” he leaves behind “an audience that will no longer take the theater of media-driven politics seriously,” as Timothy Egan wrote. His funny, but tough take on events was a major source of news for young people, particularly liberal ones.

The original Jon Stewart, before he was replaced with the vaudeville version who mostly mugged for the camera and played innuendo when he couldn’t come up with an actual thoughtful point, was quite brilliant in two things: He used humor to make news interesting, which meant that a generation too lazy to learn what was happening in the world for themselves would get at least a smattering of information.  This was no small feat.

But his second trick, discussed in Dannegal Young’s essay in response, is the one that mattered most: Continue reading →

My pal, Fresno criminal defense lawyer Rick Horowitz, tells the story of the guy calling to find a lawyer for his case. It’s not exactly a new story.

This morning, I received a phone call from the jail. Some poor guy is “between a rock and a hard place,” in that he’s been locked up for allegedly committing a crime – a physical assault on another person.

And he needs help.

Well, that’s what I’m here for, right?

So the guy starts to launch into his story, but before he gets very far, I stop him, because 1) I don’t like to discuss the specifics of someone’s alleged criminal activity on a recorded phone call, and 2) before too much time is taken up – because, yes, jail calls are damned expensive – I want to make sure the person I’m speaking with is actually looking to hire an attorney.

Most callers want to tell their story. Not the story, but their story.  The story is factual and informative, and it rarely takes very long to tell. Their story is replete with emotion and excuses, explanations and rationalizations, and it takes forever.  The story is useful. Their story is sometimes cathartic, but more often a scam. Continue reading →

As much as video has fundamentally altered public understanding about how the police engage with the public (trigger warning: the word “fuck” appears with unfortunate regularity), and many of us ponder why the police don’t seem to have an adequate appreciation of the fact that people can see or hear what’s happening, it sometimes bites back.  And when the butt bitten belongs to an academic, it suggests that nobody has a firm grasp on the fact that lies aren’t going to fly.

Minati Roychoudhuri is an English professor at Capital Community College. Granted, it ain’t Yale, but then, it’s still a college.  When she was stopped by a police officer in Connecticut, she was sufficiently outraged to shoot off a letter to the Commissioner of Public Safety protesting her having been racially profiled.

Racial profiling? That’s bad stuff. It’s wrong for police to stop a driver just because of their skin.  Something should be done about it. And so she did:

Dear Sir/Madam Continue reading →

If we learned nothing else from the autopsy of Michael Brown after he was gunned down in the street in Ferguson, it’s that people don’t “get” autopsies.  Neither physics nor human bodies behave quite as simply as the simplistic minds that conclude it proves that something did, or didn’t happen.  And so it happens again, this time with 19-year-old Zachary Hammond.

The backstory exceeds sad and meanders swiftly into pathetic.  Driving the car, this 2014 high school student with no priors was out with a young lady who had some weed to sell. As it turns out, she was selling it to the cops.

Their son was not the target of the marijuana bust police were attempting, but the girl who was with him may have been, they said.

Tori Dianna Morton, 23, of Pickens was in the car but uninjured in the incident, police said. She was charged with simple possession of marijuana and released Monday from the Oconee County Detention Center, according to police and jail records.

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At The Watch, Radley Balko dissects the Seventh Circuit’s opinion in United States v. Bentley, holding that Lex the wonderdog is sufficiently fabulous to give rise to probable cause to search. Like all drug sniffing dogs, Lex went to doggy drug school. He did not do well. But still, he’s a dog.

Lex, the drug dog that searched Bentley’s car, had a 93 percent alert rate. That is, when Lex was called to search a car, he alerted 93 percent of the time. He was basically a probable cause generator. His success rate was much lower, at 59 percent. That is, the police actually found drugs just six of the 10 times Lex told them they would. That means that four of every 10 people Lex alerted to were subjected to a thorough roadside search that produced nothing illegal.

When dogs show up in court, figuratively, not literally, they are drug-sniffing heroes.  The reason is fairly obvious. When no drugs are found, no one gets arrested and, after having been detained and subjected to a search, the humans are released into the wild. No one knows. No judge is asked to pay attention.

Consider how much fun judges would have if every driver stopped and searched following a false alert was nonetheless taken to court for arraignment. Continue reading →

The first thing cops should anticipate when raiding a medical marijuana dispensary is that there will be video.  The second thing is that when the cops go around disabling the video, they’re going to miss a few cameras because they’re well hidden and, cops being cops, it’s just too much effort to do their job well.

Sucks if you’re one of the three Santa Ana cops who participated in the raid on Sky High Holistic.  Especially if, after you thought nobody was watching, you started munching down on those delicious chocolate brownies. Yum.

A lawsuit, filed last week in Orange County Superior Court by three unidentified police officers and the Santa Ana Police Officers Association, seeks to prevent Santa Ana Police Department internal affairs investigators from using the video as they sort out what happened during the May 26 raid of Sky High Collective.

Lawyers for police and the dispensary said the video – which has been widely seen on television and several online news sites, could play a key role in the ongoing investigation into the officers’ actions.

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Reinventing law is all the rage, with those who see money to be made promoting the idea that roadblocks like the Unauthorized Practice of Law are sapping their potential profits.  They hate that.

But there is a far more nefarious effort to reinvent law happening on college campuses, as reflected in the handling of campus sexual assault and rape, where the reinvention doesn’t pertain to shiny devices (well, not directly anyway), but to the fundamentals of due process, the rules that have been developed over the millennia to provide fundamental fairness to those accused of committing an offense.

The failings of campus adjudication has been a subject of many posts here, but the upshot of these adjudications is that colleges and universities, at the direction of the Department of Education upon pain of financial ruin, have essentially wiped the slate of due process clean, and decided to reinvent their procedures as if this was a fresh debate with neither history nor understanding of what processes are needed to assure fundamental fairness.

The recalibration of due process has not gone well, with the arguments confused and irrational.  Arguments such as why the accuser is just as entitled to due process as the accused are proffered, though the simple answer is that due process is only for the accused because they are the person in jeopardy.  Continue reading →

Via Ex-Cop Lawyer, a video of traffic stops and police encounters gone stupid.

No, this isn’t to say that the police officers’ handling was laudable, but that there are a great many people who are ridiculously obstinate in their interactions because they believe that they know the law, their rights, the Constitution, and what they are entitled to do. And they’re wrong.  Sometimes humorously. Sometimes frustratingly. Sometimes, just insufferably stupid.

It’s one thing to argue that you don’t agree with the law, that you think the law should be different. Most of us do, though we don’t usually agree with what we would change to make the world better.  Indeed, some would have the law go in exactly the opposite direction that you think it should. Never assume that most people think like you. Continue reading →